Rick Michetti was at the bar the night Bayside opened, working on a vodka tonic and telling anyone who'd listen that he remembered the room from a different life. "I've been coming here since it was Barnaby's, way back in 1999," he said, while the new bartender mixed margaritas and gimlets for a steady line of regulars streaming in the door. Nobody had announced much beyond a couple of social media posts. People showed up anyway.
That turnout tells you something about what the last several years have actually felt like here. For a long stretch, the honest answer to "where should we eat tonight" in Inverness was "let's see if anything's open." That's not a complaint about the food. It's a description of a supply problem, and it's worth understanding exactly how it happened, because the fix that's underway right now is more interesting than a simple restaurant opening.
The math that kept the room dark
The building at 12938 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, the one everyone still calls the boatel, has hosted a restaurant on and off since 1947, when an Army nurse named Dorothy Meloney used a G.I. loan to buy a stove and grill and opened a soda fountain called Tombahia. Barnaby's ran there longest, 23 years from 1985 to 2008. After that came Thepmonggan Thai for eight years, then Fog's Kitchen from 2016 to 2019. In 2021, current owner Jeff Harriman brought in an outside team to open something called Andy's by the Bay. That deal stalled before it opened, and the room sat empty through the rest of the pandemic and beyond it. The Press Democrat put a number on it in May: after seven quiet years, the space finally turned its lights back on.
Seven years is a long time for a waterfront dining room to sit dark in a town this size. Part of the reason is straightforward. Every tenant after Barnaby's leased the space from Harriman, which means every one of them needed the restaurant to cover rent from close to day one, in a room that seats a fraction of what a Highway 1 spot would in a bigger town and that quiets down considerably once the fog rolls in on a Tuesday. That's a hard bet for an outside operator to keep making. It's a much easier bet for the person who owns the building and doesn't have a landlord to answer to.
The owner decided to run it himself
This time, Harriman didn't lease the space out. He hired a father-daughter team, James and Sophia Tolbert, to run it directly, as employees rather than tenants. Both grew up in the San Geronimo Valley and still live there. Sophia's parents actually met working in West Marin food service, her dad tending bar at the Old Western Saloon and her mom baking at the Bovine Bakery, so the Tolberts aren't newcomers learning the territory. They're locals who know exactly what a West Marin bar needs to feel like.
That distinction between owned and leased matters more than it might seem to at first. It's the difference between a room that has to work immediately and a room that gets to be a long-term project for someone who isn't going anywhere.
Bayside kept the pool table, foosball table and dart boards left over from the Barnaby's days, and added board games and puzzles to the lounge. Harriman has described the concept as a "Cheers" vibe with a West Marin twist, with live music planned along with trivia nights, guest speakers and seasonal celebrations once the kitchen settles in. The menu leans casual and coastal: New England clam chowder, rock cod ceviche, smoked black cod dip, beer-battered fish and chips, wood-fired pizza and a vegan banh mi, with a large smoker turning out oysters, ribs and whole chickens. The fresh catch comes off the Wanderer, a boat that fishes out of Bodega Bay.
Bayside is opening in stages, and the current hours are worth writing down if you're planning a weeknight:
- Sunday, Monday, Thursday: bar open 3:30 to 9 p.m., food served 4 to 8 p.m.
- Friday, Saturday: bar open 3:30 to 10 p.m., food served until 8:30 p.m.
- Tuesday and Wednesday: closed for now, with dinner service planned to expand to all seven days, plus weekend brunch and lunch, as the kitchen scales up.
For details or reservations, Tomales Bay Resort's restaurant page has the current schedule.
"My dad and I are excited to lean into that old West Marin bayside charm," Sophia Tolbert said of the reopening.
Down the road, a different kind of kitchen
Bayside isn't the only room coming back. Saltwater Oyster Depot closed last summer, and for months its logo sat covered by a hand-lettered "restaurant available" sign across the street from the bay. The team taking over that space runs the Coast Café in Bolinas, and they're calling the new concept First Valley Bistro. Roseanne Lavoy, Enrique Hernandez and Patrick Sullivan, the trio behind Coast Café's long-running Sunday surf-crowd scene, were targeting an early July opening in the old Saltwater room, according to reporting from Point Reyes Light back in May. If that timeline held, the room that sat behind a paper sign all spring should be full again by the time you read this.
What's notable isn't just that two rooms are opening close together. It's that they're shaping up to be genuinely different places. Bayside is built for a low-key weeknight, a family dinner, a game of pool after work. A team that's spent years running Coast Café's weekend rush is more likely to build First Valley into a destination room, the kind of place you plan a Saturday night around rather than wander into. For a town that spent the last year down to a single sit-down option, having two rooms with two different personalities is a bigger change than the raw count suggests.
The one still waiting
Not every empty storefront in Inverness has a plan attached yet. Vladimir's Czech Restaurant, a fixture on this stretch of shoreline for more than six decades, closed in 2023. The building has since been purchased by the Point Reyes Good Luck Fund, a group focused on buying and holding legacy West Marin properties, which is now looking for a long-term occupant. No name, no opening date yet. But it's the same underlying fix as Bayside, just from a different direction: someone who doesn't need the first year's rent to pencil out is willing to sit on the building until the right tenant shows up, rather than handing it to whoever's willing to sign a lease.
Through all of this, the dining room at Inverness Park Market, right next to the Tap Room, largely held down the fort as the town's lone sit-down option. It's still worth remembering on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, when Bayside is dark and First Valley might be too. It was never the problem. It was just the only answer for a while.
What this actually changes
If you live here, the restaurant count matters less than what's now possible with it: pool table or patio table, weeknight or weekend, the room with the smoker or the room with the surf-crowd energy. For years the only real question was whether anything was open at all. Now you get to have preferences again. Sophia Tolbert has talked about eventually selling picnic boxes for the short walk to Chicken Ranch Beach, tide permitting. That's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing you only plan for once you expect to still be here in a year, which is exactly the bet an owner-operator can make that a short-term tenant can't.
If you've been putting off a call to a friend about grabbing dinner on the west shore because you weren't sure anything would be open, it might be time to make that call again.
For questions about homes, land or life along this stretch of Tomales Bay, Terry Donohue has spent decades watching this town's small businesses open, close and reopen. Call or text Terry for local guidance on Bolinas & West Marin homes.